It’s … The Encyclopedia of American loons! Our new and exciting series presenting a representative sample of American loons from A-Z.

Friday, May 15, 2015

#1368: Joel Belz

Joel Belz is the founder of God’s World Publications, which
includes the World Journalism Institute and WORLD
Magazine, a biweekly fundamentalist tract. He is also a signatory to the Manhattan Declaration,
and otherwise disconcertingly influential on the religious right.

To outsiders, the WORLD
Magazine is most famous for its virulent anti-gay stance, and Belz himself has
claimed that the “homosexual agenda” is “an extreme in-your-face challenge to God’s order.” When WORLD named ex-gay
activist Alan Chambers the “2011 Daniel of the Year” (that was before Chambers disavowed reparative therapy),
Belz accused supporters of marriage equality of being “forces of anarchy” who
are “undefining the family.” “If heterosexual immorality is like driving 85 mph
in a 35 mph zone,” said Belz, “then homosexual immorality is like going 85 mph
the wrong way on a one-way street,” which is a good quote but oh, so
wrong-headed.

Belz is, of course, also a creationist. Indeed, Belz has
lamented how “the rise of Darwinism led step by step, discipline by discipline,
cultural corner by cultural corner, to the exclusion of God from public
discussion.” But it’s not only Darwin: “Darwin did it successfully in the field
of science, Marx in economic theory, Freud in psychology and the social
sciences, Dewey in education, and then almost everyone in politics.” Indeed, it
seems, all of modern science is really a conspiracy against Jesus! Which shows
that Freud, Marx and Darwin are really just three sides of the same coin. Now,
Belz says that the huge disparity between what the public thinks about
evolution and what the scientific community says is part of a larger problem, which
is correct, but Belz suggests that the discrepancy means that scientists are
therefore wrong because … well, conspiracy, mostly. In fact, evolution,
according to Belz, is one of the “seven Big Lies we are all subjected to
virtually all the time” by the media (which is part of the conspiracy against
Jesus). Other lies include global warming, where, once again, the media just
appeals to experts “instead of serious two-way arguments” with the public who
tend (in Belz’s mind at least) to disagree with them. (The other items on his
list of “lies” are homosexuality (he cites Richard Cohen’s

“research”), stem-cell research, Islam and pluralism.)

Diagnosis: We’ve seen a lot of fundamentalist denialists,
but few people we have covered are so thoroughly and staunchly and zealously
anti-science as Joe Belz. We should perhaps not exaggerate his influence, but
it is certainly not negligible.